Yet this town, as well as most Italian paesi, would reward a more lengthened stay, and, unlike many of them, a refined life is possible here. A person at once studiously and economically inclined might do much worse than commit himself to spend several months in the city of St. Francis. We did so last year, on the same principle that made us in childhood prefer the cherries that the birds had pecked, finding them the sweetest. We had heard Asisi abused: it was out of the world, it was desperately dull and there was nothing to eat. We therefore sent and engaged an apartment for the summer, and our confidence was not betrayed.
Perhaps the hotels are not good: we have never tried them. But the market is excellent for a mountain-city, and in the autumn figs and grapes are cheap and abundant. There are apartments to be let, and servants to be had who, with a little instruction, soon learn to cook in a civilized manner.
We have a fancy that there is a different moral atmosphere in a town surrounded by olive trees and one set in vineyards, the former being more sober and reserved, the latter more joyous and expansive. The latter may, indeed, carry its spirit too far—like the little city of Zagorolo near Rome, where the inhabitants are noted at the same time for the strength and excellence of their wines and for the quarrelsomeness of their dispositions. Palestrina, a little way off on the hillside, with a flowing skirt of vines all about it, breathes laughter in its very air. One may sit in Bernardini's—known to all visitors to the city of Fortune—and hear the travellers who come there laugh over mishaps which they would have growled over anywhere else. The comparison might be made of many other towns.
Asisi is set in a world of olives. They swing like smoke from a censer all through the corn and grain of the plain; they roll up the hills and mountains, climbing the almost perpendicular heights like goats; they crawl through the ravines; they cover the tiny plateaus set between the crowded hills; and plantations of slim young trees are set through the city, bending like long feathers and turning a soft silver as the wind passes over them. It is delightful to walk under the olive trees in early summer, when they hang full of strings of tiny cream-colored blossoms. In winter these blossoms will have changed to a small black fruit. The trees are as rugged as the roughest old apple trees, and many of them are supported only on a hollow half-circle of trunk or on two or three mere sticks. One wonders how these slender fragments of trunk can support that spreading weight above, especially in wind and tempest, and how that wealth of blossom and fruit can draw sufficient sustenance through such narrow and splintered channels; but the olive is tough, and the oil that runs in its veins for blood keeps it ever vigorous.
True to my fancy—which, indeed, it helped to nourish—Asisi is a serious town. It has even an air of gentle melancholy, which is not, however, depressing, but which inclines to thoughtfulness and study. Travellers are familiar with its aspect—the crowning citadel with the ring of green turf between it and the city, which stretches across the shoulders of the mountain, row above row of gray houses, with the magnificent pile of the church and convent of St. Francis at its western extremity, clasped to the steep rock with a hold that an earthquake could scarcely loosen. Three long streets stretch from east to west, the central one a very respectable street, clean, well-paved, and delightfully quiet. You may sit in a window there and hear nothing the livelong day but the drip of a fountain and the screaming of clouds of swallows, which are, without exception, the most impudent birds that can be imagined. Annoyed one day by the persistent "peeping" of a swallow that had perched in a nook just outside my window, I leaned out and frightened him away with my handkerchief. He darted down to a little olive-plantation below, and a minute after up came a score or two of swallows and began flying round in a circle directly before my window, screaming like little demons. Now and then one would dart out of the circle and make a vicious dip toward my face, with the evident wish to peck my eyes out, so that I was glad to draw back. It reminded me of the famous circular battery which attacked one of the Confederate forts during our civil war, and it was quite as well managed.
The vetturino whom we took from the station up to the town on our arrival told me, when I gave my address, that the Sor Filomena had gone away from Asisi, and I had better go to the hotel Leone. I insisted on being taken to the Sor Filomena's house. He replied that the house was closed, and renewed his recommendations of the Leone. After the inevitable combat we succeeded in having ourselves set down at our lodgings, where Sor Filomena's rosy face appeared at the open door.
"Why did you tell such a lie?" I asked of the unblushing vetturino, using the rough word bugia.
He looked insulted: "I have not told a bugia."
With a philosophical desire for information I repeated the question, using the milder word mensogna. He drew himself up, looked virtuous and declared that he had not told a mensogna.
"Why, then," I asked, "have you said one thing for another?"